Blogroll

EVENTS

Lab grown vaginas

You might think I’m writing a check with that headline these blogg’n finger can’t cash. If so, you would be wrong! There really is such a report out and vaginas are not the only things being grown in vitro, or outside of the body, whatever the terminology might be.

Philly.com — Doctors have successfully implanted laboratory-grown vaginas into four teenage girls suffering from a rare birth defect, creating new organs with feel and function comparable to that of a “natural” vagina, a new study reports.

Another research team is reporting the first successful nose reconstruction surgery using laboratory-grown cartilage. In both cases, doctors harvested the patients’ own cells and used them to create new tissue that was then grafted back onto the body.

I have no idea how the usual suspects will react to this one. It doesn’t involve embryonic stem cells or cloning, the technique could benefit everyone sooner or later in some way regardless of what part one needs fixed, so there’s no religious right standard boiler-plate for it — as far as I know. But the articles trending on the web do involve scary lady parts and women’s’ health, so odds are some old white self-righteous assholes somewhere will have to figure out a way to object.

I can see how these could function like ‘natural’ but how do the researchers know they feel ‘natural’ to the receiver? No snark, I’d just like to know how this was determined and how the neural hookup is done.

Well, the most direct route of objection would be invoking the naturalistic fallacy or its religious version of “interfering with a god’s plan”. It sounds like this could be used to grow genital structures for people who wish to transition biological gender presentation, so we can probably expect some transphobic outcries as well.

From the news report (haven’t yet read the Lancet article, but I plan to) it looks like a very similar process, except that the scaffolding is artificial, biodegradable, and hand-sewn. The last bit fascinates me–I have designed and sewn both clothing and animals (nothing complicated), and while in hindsight it seems a no-brainer that this sort of construction would make a perfect substrate (I expect 3-D printing will eventually take over, but the variety of material available makes sewing just so perfect at present), the notion that something so basic as sewing could have such an incredible impact on people’s physical lives. Maybe it’s silly, but it really makes me glad I am living in an era where such things are possible–that something older than written history is also cutting-edge medical technology.